The Republican frontrunner repudiated a long litany of party orthodoxies in a contentious debate—but will that hurt his candidacy, or help it?

Donald Trump blamed the Bush administration for failing to heed CIA warnings before 9/11; denounced the Iraq War for destabilizing the Middle East; defended the use of eminent domain; promised to save Social Security without trimming benefits; and credited Planned Parenthood for “wonderful things having to do with women's health.”

He’s fresh off a crushing victory in New Hampshire, and the prohibitive favorite in the polls in South Carolina. Will his flouting of Republican orthodoxy sink his chances—or is it his very willingness to embrace these heterodox stances that has fueled his rise?

Even his rivals no longer seem certain of the answer. Jeb Bush, at one point, called Trump “a man who insults his way to the nomination.” He sounded like a man ruing a race that has run away from him.

If Donald Trump willingly raised his own heresies, the rest of the candidates spent their nights gleefully pointing out each other’s divergences from standard conservative positions. Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Jeb Bush again mixed it up on immigration. Bush attacked John Kasich for supporting Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid. Rubio had to defend using the tax code to accomplish social-policy objectives. Only Ben Carson stayed clear of the fray, but that only served to underline his increasing irrelevance to the race.

Despite the venue’s name—the Peace Center—the debate was the nastiest and most acrimonious of the cycle. (The auditorium takes its name from its generous donors, the Peace family, a fact that hardly diminishes the irony.) The candidates talked over each other and the moderators, hurled charges, traded insults, and made no effort to disguise their mutual contempt.

Looming over the debate was the death of Justice Antonin Scalia earlier on Saturday—a man who reshaped America’s understanding of its Constitution, and whose passing has now reshaped the political landscape. The debate opened with a moment of silence, and the moderators lost no time in asking the candidates for their views on how his seat on the Supreme Court should be filled.

Not by President Obama, it seems. “I think it’s up to Mitch McConnell and everybody else to stop it,” said Trump. “It’s called delay, delay, delay.” One by one, the others voiced their assent. John Kasich decried partisanship, and then called for a partisan delay. Rubio agreed. “We have 80 years of precedent of not confirming Supreme Court justices in an election year,” thundered Cruz. He was brought up short by the moderator, John Dickerson, who pointed out that Anthony Kennedy was confirmed in 1988—an election year. Cruz pointed out that Kennedy was nominated in 1987, although that was still less then 12 months before the election.

If the candidates agreed that one of them, and not Obama, should have the chance to choose Scalia’s successor, it was a rare moment of accord on the stage. They clashed on other issues, from tax plans to immigration to foreign policy—to Donald Trump’s business record.

In a week, voters in South Carolina will head to the polls. It will be a clarifying moment for the Republican Party. Donald Trump is gambling that enough of them will endorse his challenge to the policy establishment’s consensus—or at least, his willingness to offer straight talk—to allow him to add the state to his column. Jeb Bush hopes that enough South Carolinians retain a fondness for his brother, and for the family legacy he represents, to allow him to beat out Kasich and Rubio. Those two candidates are looking to South Carolina to tip the race in their favor, after mixed results in Iowa and New Hampshire. And Ted Cruz is trying to turn this into a two-man race, take down Trump, and wrest control of the Republican Party from the establishment.

If Trump can replicate the results in New Hampshire—as the polls presently suggest he may—it will be more than a personal victory. It would require a plurality of Republican voters in a deeply conservative state to embrace a candidate who has repudiated many of their party’s signature stances. Whatever his showing in the primary, Donald Trump has already shifted the terms of the debate in ways that will long outlast him.

—Yoni Appelbaum

Updates

It was a remarkable moment when in a heated exchanged between Cruz and Rubio over immigration, Cruz spoke a few words of Spanish. The two Cuban-American senators have up to now not touched, even briefly, on their Cuban heritage during the debates. Cruz’s words may have simply been a jab at Rubio for accusing him of not speaking Spanish, but it also marks a shift in discourse on Latinos, as the party up to now has isolated many of them for its aggressive rhetoric over immigration.

Rubio needed to make a good impression at tonight's debate after the great robot glitch debacle of 2016 last time around. It doesn't look like he made any viral-worthy missteps tonight. Rubio also seemed notably aggressive in some of his attacks, particularly against Ted Cruz.

Many right-wingers on Twitter are saying the debate was awful for Trump. As usual, one hesitates to make such a claim given the track record of such predictions. The winnowing of the field does seem to have put more focus on him. Nobody fades into the woodwork in a 6-man debate the way they do when there are 10 of them on stage.

For a long time, Republican voters have managed to live with the cognitive dissonance of thinking that George W. Bush made a mistake by going into Iraq, where there were no weapons of mass destruction, but that he is also a good president who "kept us safe.” Tonight, Donald Trump declared not only that Bush erred by going into Iraq, but that he lied about WMDs and failed to keep us safe because 9/11 happened on his watch. How will today’s anti-establishment Republicans respond? What will South Carolinians think? I confess that I don’t know. But the answers to those questions would go a long way toward determining how this debate will affect the Republican race.

Trump: Politicians are all talk, no action. A reference to the congressional budget process! We don't win anymore—health care, ISIS, vets, borders. We are not going to be controlled by special interests and lobbyists. "I'm working for you. I'm not working for anybody else."

Cruz: "Our country literally hangs in the balance." Do you want a conservative—a proven conservative who will stand and fight for you every day? If we nominate the wrong candidate, the Supreme Court will go astray.

Rubio: Wrong is now considered right, right is considered wrong. Things are terrible all around the world. But 2016 can be a turning point. Protect life and marriage. Constitutional rights come from God. A new American century.

Carson basically admits a lot of voters have told him they don't think he's electable. "If all the people who say, 'I love Ben Carson and his policies, but he can't win' vote for me, not only can we win, but we can turn this thing around." Not a great sign for your presidential campaign.

Bush: There will be an unforeseen challenge—a disaster, a pandemic, an attack—so think about who you want to lead us in that situation. "I will have a steady hand" and unite the country around a common purpose. "We led. We ran to the challenge." A servant's heart, a backbone.

Carson: "I, like you, am a member of we the people." America is too good for what's happening to her right now. Vote for me and we can turn this thing around. I will be accountable to everybody and beholden to none.

Ben Carson offers a quote—“Joseph Stalin said if you want to bring America down you have to undermine three things—our spiritual life, our patriotism, and our morality”—only it seems Stalin never said the words that Carson attributes to him.

I’m not sure Donald Trump is going to win points by saying that he exploited the system “just like the biggest business leaders in the country.” Those leaders belong to the very class that many voters distrust.

Trump is asked if he listens to people who tell him he’s wrong. In response, Trump says, sometimes the experts are wrong and you have to be able to tell them they’re wrong. I’m going take that as a “No.”

In a back-and-forth with Trump on Planned Parenthood, Cruz disputes that the organization has any value. He said he disagrees with Trump's assertion that— putting aside the abortions some clinics perform—Planned Parenthood supports "wonderful things having to do with women's health."

Shorter Trump on foreign policy: "When you're fighting wars, you're going one way, you have a plan, it's a beautiful plan, you can't lose, the enemy makes a change and all of a sudden you have to change. You have to have flexibility.”

Among all the debates so far, I prefer the aesthetics of the PBS broadcast, and dislike this CBS approach of running sound-bytes before and after commercial breaks. There’s no way for them to do so neutrally, and no reason to further elevate sound-bytes in a political landscape dominated by them.

Ben Carson’s campaign shows a deeply unsettling pattern of operation, raking in an enormous number of donations, and spending much of the resultant cash on fundraising operations and consultants, many of them tied closely to campaign insiders. It’s a thought I can’t shake every time he uses a question to ask viewers to visit his website, which asks for donations—what will these donors receive in exchange for their investment in his increasingly hopeless campaign, and what sacrifices will their donations entail?

As best I can tell, Ben Carson is the one remaining candidate who can’t make a credible case for his space on the stage. Neither his past performance nor his poll numbers nor his resources appear to give him even the most unlikely path to the nomination. And substantively, he isn’t adding a new perspective, as Lindsey Graham and Rand Paul both did prior to dropping out of the race.

When Cruz refers to the Senate immigration bill as the "Rubio-Schumer amnesty plan," the crowd boos loudly. "Apparently supported by the donor class," Cruz adds. Looks like Cruz and Trump are in agreement that the audience tonight is made up of hostile establishment-types.

Cruz accuses Rubio of supporting citizenship for “12 million people” in the country illegally. It’s a reminder of just how disconnected from reality the debate over immigration often is. In 2014, for the first time in years, the population of illegal immigrants dipped below 11 million. It’s a shrinking population, not a growing one—but you’d never know it listening tonight.

Rubio offers a definition of amnesty I've never heard pols use before: "Amnesty is the forgiveness of a wrongdoing without consequence." It underlines Rubio's belief that immigrating to this country illegally isn't that "act of love" his opponent Bush once said it is—rather, it's an act as wrong as any other crime.

Donald Trump promised to fund social spending by cracking down on “waste, fraud, and abuse.” Is that practical? They’re real problems, as Eric Schnurer wrote in 2013. But even bringing them down to private-sector levels isn’t going to solve the structural problems these programs face.

Unless the political world has been turned upside down, South Carolina Republicans will punish Donald Trump for blaming 9/11 on George W. Bush and calling the former president’s team a bunch of liars. (Note: The political world has been turned upside down.)

Bush won the South Carolina primary in 2000, rebounding from a stunning loss to John McCain in New Hampshire. The Bush family has deep ties to the state and its community of troops and veterans.

CBS debate moderator John Dickerson mischievously asked Trump whether he still thought Bush should be impeached. Trump didn’t quite answer the question, but he accused the Bush administration of knowingly deceiving the nation about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

“They lied!” Trump bellowed.

Lashing back was Bush’s brother, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, who said that while Trump was building a TV reality show, George W. Bush was “building a security apparatus.”

Once again, Trump has crossed a line that conventional wisdom would suggest is too far. Attack prisoners of war. Mock the disabled. Swear in public. "I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose voters," Trump said in Iowa.

The Wall Street Journal’s Kimberley Strassel outlines a potential attack against Rubio: the idea that his tax plan adheres to liberal principles. Strassel asks Rubio to defend the fact that his tax plan has the highest tax rate of any candidate, and questions his rationale for suggesting he'd use the money to pay for a tripling of the child tax credit. "Normally, it's liberals who like to use the tax code to influence social policy," Strassel says.

Medicaid expansion is the thing conservative policy wonks hate, hate, hate about Kasich's record. He has plenty of practice defending it, but there are a lot of people on the right (e.g. Erick Erickson) who will never, ever consider him because of it.

Kasich expanded Medicaid in his state under the Affordable Care Act, and is asked to defend how much it costs. He disputes that the costs to Ohio are too high, and says expansion helps the mentally ill, the working poor, and those with serious illnesses, like cancer. And he insists expansion hasn't hurt Ohio's bottom line: Ohio has a surplus, has fewer taxes, "and frankly we leave no one behind."

As Marco Rubio talked about the importance of family formation, and said that the most important role of everyone on stage was as parents, I wondered if we’ve ever had a president without children. The answer, as best I can tell checking quickly, is that Presidents James Buchanan, James Madison, and George Washington are the only ones who did not have biological children.

Marco Rubio: “Parenting is the msot important job that we’ll ever have. My tax plan… creates an additional child tax credit…I’m going to have a tax plan that’s pro-family… You cannot have a strong country without a strong family." For more on the Florida senator’s tax plan, here’s Derek.

Ted Cruz’s insistence that his tax plan isn’t a Value Added Tax is akin to his repeated efforts to redefine carpetbombing—no matter how many times he says it, or how emphatically, he’s stuck trying to redefine how everyone else has always used these terms. His flat tax would be applied to businesses, but would function as a steep, and highly regressive, sales tax. It’s striking that he refuses to defend it for what it is, and instead persists in attempting to redefine well-established terms.

And it’s almost surreal to see the long overdue grappling with 9/11 and the response to it framed around whether George W. Bush “kept us safe” or not, Yoni. Even if we don’t count the roughly 3,000 Americans who died on 9/11—and I’m not sure why we would—George W. Bush’s insufficient planning for Iraq, and his failing strategy there for years, resulted in thousands more Americans coming home in body bags. Even given the invasion of Iraq, he didn’t keep our troops as safe as he might have.

“I just wish we hadn’t run so fast into politics,” Ohio Governor John Kasich said of the response to the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Then he urged Republican senators to block whomever Barack Obama nominates to replace Scalia. Because, politics.

Obama can’t be trusted to make a good pick, Kasich said.

CBS moderator John Dickerson opened Saturday night’s debate by questioning several GOP presidential candidates about the balance of power in shaping the Supreme Court. This immediately became clear: What’s good for the GOP goose is not good for the Democratic gander.

Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush said the context of Supreme Court picks he supports a “strong executive.” That is, apparently, unless the chief executive is Barack Obama, who Bush said in incapable of choosing a nominee with “consensus orientation.” Bush said he would do so.

Donald Trump was asked: Should a Supreme Court vacancy emerge in his final year as president, would he nominate a replacement? Of course he would, Trump replied, and he suspects Obama will put forward a nominee.

Not that Trump wants Obama’s pick to get a fair hearing. “Stop it,” he told GOP senators. “It’s called delay, delay, delay.”

This is an astonishing moment. The modern Republican Party, to some substantial extent, redefined itself around 9/11. Whether the Bush administration might have done more to prevent that attack, and whether it responded appropriately to its aftermath, have been subjects that are largely off limits. Now the Republican frontrunner, fresh of a crushing victory in New Hampshire, has laid the blame for those attacks squarely at the feet of George W. Bush—who, he charges, didn’t listen to the warnings of his own CIA—and repudiated the invasion of Iraq that followed as a disaster.

Ouch. Rubio is up with a burn for Al Gore who, if he's watching, is probably surprised his name got brought up at all. Rubio says he thanks God all the time it was George W. Bush in the Oval Office on 9/11 and not Gore.

Kasich sounds very much like the George W. Bush of 2000, who also ran against "nation-building." In fact, when Kasich ran for president in 1999, Bush pushed him out of the race in large part because their messages were so similar

"It's bloodsport for him, he enjoys it and I'm glad he's happy about it," Bush says of Trump's penchant for insulting him. He adds that he's "sick and tired of him going after my family. My dad is the greatest man alive in my mind." Bush adds that he's proud of what his brother did to build a security apparatus to keep us safe.

“This is from a guy who gets his foreign policy from the shows,” says Jeb Bush in a jab to Donald Trump, adding later, over Trump’s remarks, “This is a man who insults his way to the nomination.” The two have tangled in the past, but we’re seeing a renewed energy from Bush, who at times has appeared defeated in other debates.

The Republican County chairs in South Carolina were each handed "dozens" of tickets to tonights debate, according to published reports, and passed them out to loyal party workers. It's no suprise, then, that the audience seems quite friendly to candidates like Jeb Bush—and hostile to Donald Trump.

“We need to make it clear to Russia what we expect,” Kasich says, adding that he would arm Ukraine. The Ohio governor, who comes into the debate after a second-place finish in New Hampshire, may have more time to speak tonight after the departure of Chris Christie this week. But can he secure a strong footing tonight to sail through South Carolina next week?

Kasich on foreign policy and coalition building: "I think we have an opportunity as America to put something really great together again." Is that like Making America Great again, only without quite the same ring to it?

Carson takes a page out of Bernie Sanders' book when he defends his lack of political background: He says judgment, not experience, is key. Sanders has said that his judgment trumps Clinton's experience on issues of foreign policy.

Ted Cruz says that there’s no precendet for a Supreme Court appointment in the last 80 years. The moderator challenges him on that, pointing out that Justice Anthony Kennedy was confirmed in 1988. Cruz shoots back that he was nominated in 1987.

The facts? Kennedy was nominated by Ronald Reagan on November 30, 1987, and confirmed by the Senate on February 3, 1988. So he was nominated—and confirmed—with less than a year to go before an election. It’s hard to see why that’s not a relevant precedent, despite Cruz’s protestations to the contrary.

Donald Trump declares that one of the first questions he’ll ask his national security advisers is “what we want to do.” Also, “how hard to we want to hit.” Naturally, I’m totally reassured about his preparedness to be Commander in Chief.

Cruz presents a dire case for conservatives hoping the next nominee will share their beliefs: He suggests that "we" would be giving the court away for a generation to liberals if President Obama's nominee is confirmed.

Rubio, like some of his fellow contenders, says the president shouldn’t nominate someone. This debate is an important one for the Florida senator, who earlier this week blamed his weak primary results in New Hampshire on a poor performance at the last Republican debate, pledging to change his strategy. Whether he can divert from canned lines tonight remains to be seen.

Rubio presents his vision for the next Supreme Court nominee: another Antonin Scalia. "We need to put people on the bench who understand the Constitution is not a living, breathing document," who are originalists.

The idea that a justice shouldn't be appointed out of deference to the will of the people is at least arguable. but the idea Carson's putting out, that there should be no nomination because of some sort of yearlong period of national mourning, is weird.

Ben Carson notes the average life expectance when the Constitution was written—he put it at age 50—and argues that the meaning of a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court has changed. There’s some truth to that, but it shouldn’t be overstated. The lower average life-expectancy had more to do with more people dying at birth than the folks who made it to old age dying decades sooner.

“Here’s my concern about this,” says Kasich. “The country is so divided right now, and now we’re going to see another partisan fight take place.” He asks Obama not to nominate anyone, and if he must, choose someone who would receive unanimous consent. It’s impossible, though, to imagine any candidate right now receiving the unanimous consent of the United States Senate. It’s remarkable to see a candidate decrying partisanship with one breath, and then attempting to hold the Supreme Court hostage to partisanship in the next.

John Kasich, asked about Scalia’s death, notes how quickly Scalia’s death spiraled into a political fight not 24 hours after his death. Kasich pledges that the country, under his administration, wouldn’t be as divided.

"This is a tremendous blow to conservatism, it's a tremendous blow, frankly, to our country," Trump says on the death of Scalia. He adds it's up to Mitch McConnell and Congress to stop it. "It's called, delay, delay, delay," he says to applause.

Trump says if he were president right now, he'd try to nominate a justice "and I'm absolutely sure President Obama will try and do it." He says he hopes Senate will "do something about it." It's up to McConnell and other senators "to stop it."

Apparently determined not to repeat the fiasco at the last debate, the moderators tonight started their introductions with the candidates already out on the stage, instead of asking them to enter from off in the wings.

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The president has been intervening in the process of producing a border wall, on behalf of a favored firm.

Updated at 10:20 a.m. ET on May 25, 2019.

Many of the tales of controversy to emerge from the Trump administration have been abstract, or complicated, or murky. Whenever anyone warns about destruction of “norms,” the conversation quickly becomes speculative—the harms are theoretical, vague, and in the future.

This makes new Washington Post reporting about President Donald Trump’s border wall especially valuable. The Post writes about how Trump has repeatedly pressured the Army Corps of Engineers and the Department of Homeland Security to award a contract for building a wall at the southern U.S. border to a North Dakota company headed by a leading Republican donor.

The story demonstrates the shortcomings of Trump’s attempt to bring private-sector techniques into government. It shows his tendency toward cronyism, his failures as a negotiator, and the ease with which a fairly primitive attention campaign can sway him. At heart, though, what it really exemplifies is Trump’s insistence on placing performative gestures over actual efficacy. And it is a concrete example—almost literally—of how the president’s violations of norms weaken the country and waste taxpayer money.

In war, the temptation to take revenge is strong. Fighting that temptation is a commanding officer’s job.

“We fight with the values that we represent; we don’t adopt those of our enemy.” This is what I told the Marines standing in a loose semicircle around me on our forward operating base outside Karmah, Iraq, one day in December 2008. “If we lose sight of that, we’ve got nothing left.” I meant every word. For many of us it was becoming harder to make sense of the war in Iraq, but we needed to believe that we were fighting for something. Most could articulate a version of that argument themselves during squad-level discussions back in Hawaii, but now it was hard to tell what impact my words were having. I watched the familiar faces as I spoke. Some nodded, others looked at the ground, shifting their feet on the gravel or gazing back impassively, their expressions a reflection of the gray skies and drizzling rain.

An ancient faith is disappearing from the lands in which it first took root. At stake is not just a religious community, but the fate of pluralism in the region.

T

he call came in 2014, shortly after Easter. Four years earlier, Catrin Almako’s family had applied for special visas to the United States. Catrin’s husband, Evan, had cut hair for the U.S. military during the early years of its occupation of Iraq. Now a staffer from the International Organization for Migration was on the phone. “Are you ready?” he asked. The family had been assigned a departure date just a few weeks away.

“I was so confused,” Catrin told me recently. During the years they had waited for their visas, Catrin and Evan had debated whether they actually wanted to leave Iraq. Both of them had grown up in Karamles, a small town in the historic heart of Iraqi Christianity, the Nineveh Plain. Evan owned a barbershop near a church. Catrin loved her kitchen, where she spent her days making pastries filled with nuts and dates. Their families lived there: her five siblings and aging parents, his two brothers.

In theory, Amazon is a site meant to serve the needs of humans. The mega-retailer’s boundless inventory gives people easy access to household supplies and other everyday products that are rarely fun to shop for. Most people probably aren’t eager to buy clothes hangers, for instance. They just want to have hangers when they need them.

But when you type hangers into Amazon’s search box, the mega-retailer delivers “over 200,000” options. On the first page of results, half are nearly identical velvet hangers, and most of the rest are nearly identical plastic. They don’t vary much by price, and almost all of the listings in the first few pages of results have hundreds or thousands of reviews that average out to ratings between four and five stars. Even if you have very specific hanger needs and preferences, there’s no obvious choice. There are just choices.

Naturopaths have long been obsessed with a gene called MTHFR. Now vaccine skeptics are testing for it too.

David Reif, now a biologist at NC State, realized his old paper had taken on a dangerous second life when he saw it cited—not in the scientific literature, but in a court case.

The paper was titled “Genetic Basis for Adverse Events after Smallpox Vaccination,” and it came up in 2016 when a vaccine-skeptical doctor tried to argue that it explained her patient’s development delays. The court was not persuaded, but Reif’s co-authors began hearing of yet other doctors using DNA tests to exempt patients from vaccines. Just this month, San Francisco’s city attorney subpoenaed a doctor accused of giving illegal medical exemptions from vaccination, based on “two 30-minute visits and a 23andMe DNA test.” On anti-vaccine blogs and websites, activists have been sharing step-by-step instructions for ordering 23andMe tests, downloading the raw data, and using a third-party app to analyze a gene called MTHFR. Certain MTHFR mutations, they believe, predispose kids to bad reactions to vaccines, possibly even leading to autism—a fear unsupported by science.

Just as the anti-vaccination movement feeds off a handful of fringe outsiders, long-standing stereotypes about Jews have found a new vector in the latest outbreak of the disease.

As the measles has spread in and around New York, so has anti-Semitism.

Amid an outbreak largely attributed to the anti-vax movement, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention disclosed that, as of mid-May, 880 cases have been confirmed nationwide in 2019, “the greatest number of cases reported in the U.S. since 1994 and since measles was declared eliminated in 2000.” Since September 2018, 535 cases have been confirmed in Brooklyn and Queens alone, largely concentrated in Orthodox Jewish communities. Another 247 cases have been confirmed in Rockland County, north of New York City, also largely among Orthodox Jews.

The spread of measles is matched by a twin pathology. Since the start of the latest measles outbreak last fall, the Anti-Defamation League has seen a spike in reports of harassment specifically related to measles, yet another expression of rising anti-Semitism in the U.S.: pedestrians crossing the street to get away from visibly Jewish people, bus drivers barring Jews from boarding, and people tossing out slurs such as “dirty Jew.”

“Every classmate who became a teacher or doctor seemed happy,” and 29 other lessons from seeing my Harvard class of 1988 all grown up

On the weekend before the opening gavel of what’s being dubbed the Harvard affirmative-action trial, a record-breaking 597 of my fellow members of the class of ’88 and I, along with alumni from other reunion classes, were seated in a large lecture hall, listening to the new president of Harvard, Lawrence Bacow, address the issue of diversity in the admissions process. What he said—and I’m paraphrasing, because I didn’t record it—was that he could fill five whole incoming classes with valedictorians who’d received a perfect score on the SAT, but that’s not what Harvard is or will ever be. Harvard tries—and succeeds, to my mind—to fill its limited spots with a diversity not only of race and class but also of geography, politics, interests, intellectual fields of study, and worldviews.

Smith College’s annual commencement ceremony begins like any other: Graduating seniors at the women’s liberal-arts college are called up one by one to collect their diploma from the president. Perhaps some students exchange a wink with the regalia-clad honorary-degree recipients nearby as they stride across a platform overlooking the dorms they’d for years called home; others may pause to flip their cap’s tassel while blowing a kiss to the sea of parents who have long awaited this milestone commemorating their daughter’s metamorphosis from undergraduate to alumna.

Except the moment, technically, hasn’t happened quite yet: The name, degree, and accolades printed inside each padded holder seldom belong to the woman who receives it. They very likely belong, rather, to one of her nearly 700 classmates.

SpaceX and its competitors plan to envelop the planet with thousands of small objects in the next few years.

In 1957, a beach-ball-shaped satellite hurtled into the sky and pierced the invisible line between Earth and space. As it rounded the planet, Sputnik drew an unseen line of its own, splitting history into distinct parts—before humankind became a spacefaring species, and after. “Listen now for the sound that will forevermore separate the old from the new,” one NBC broadcaster said in awe, and insistent that others join him. He played the staccato call from the satellite, a gentle beep beep beep.

Decades later, we are not as impressed with satellites. There have been thousands of other Sputniks. Instead of earning front-page stories, satellites stitch together the hidden linings of our daily lives, providing and powering too many basic functions to list. They form a kind of exoskeleton around Earth, which is growing thicker every year with each new launch.

To save the Church, Catholics must detach themselves from the clerical hierarchy—and take the faith back into their own hands.

To feel relief at my mother’s being dead was once unthinkable, but then the news came from Ireland. It would have crushed her. An immigrant’s daughter, my mother lived with an eye cast back to the old country, the land against which she measured every virtue. Ireland was heaven to her, and the Catholic Church was heaven’s choir. Then came the Ryan Report.

Not long before The Boston Globe began publishing its series on predator priests, in 2002—the “Spotlight” series that became a movie of the same name—the government of Ireland established a commission, ultimately chaired by Judge Sean Ryan, to investigate accounts and rumors of child abuse in Ireland’s residential institutions for children, nearly all of which were run by the Catholic Church.